Hey, I'm Stuart.

.

My goal is to pursue a career where I can fully express my passions for
building great user experiences, nurture the growth of first-class products,
and work relentlessly as a team-member to help disrupt traditional thinking.

[DISCLAIMER: I'm new to coding, bear with my page's functionality.]

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Live by this motto. Constructed this icon to plant the reminder of this balance in my conscious 24/7 via my desktop background :)

Live by this motto. Constructed this icon to plant the reminder of this balance in my conscious 24/7 via my desktop background :)

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Cal Poly, the school I attended for my undergraduate education, highly promotes their mission statement, “Learn By Doing”. Following in fashion of this motto (and since the Graphic Communication department is quite archaic), I used my “Senior Research Project” to cultivate a better understanding of user experiences and what roles interaction designs can play in creating pleasurable outcomes. My project focused on this relationship in the mobile space, looking to unravel standards for how an experience is most friendly to end-users consistently on-the-go. Specifically, as volumes of time and units active on the mobile market continue to surge, I was curious to try and understand how leaders in businesses from their prospective industries presented brand experiences on the mobile web. Here you can find the details of my research and results. 

Cal Poly, the school I attended for my undergraduate education, highly promotes their mission statement, “Learn By Doing”. Following in fashion of this motto (and since the Graphic Communication department is quite archaic), I used my “Senior Research Project” to cultivate a better understanding of user experiences and what roles interaction designs can play in creating pleasurable outcomes. My project focused on this relationship in the mobile space, looking to unravel standards for how an experience is most friendly to end-users consistently on-the-go. Specifically, as volumes of time and units active on the mobile market continue to surge, I was curious to try and understand how leaders in businesses from their prospective industries presented brand experiences on the mobile web. Here you can find the details of my research and results. 

  • Our Director of Sales addressed the team assigned to the crossfit vertical (3 sales reps & 3 associates, including myself) informing us that 1:3 clients were signing up with services from our leading competitor. Understanding the simplicity and ease of use that crossfit owners demand and explain when asked why they chose to go with our competition, I took it upon myself to prototype a way that we could restructure the initial interaction of crossfit owners with MINDBODY. With past feedback reasoning that we were too robust, I designed a splash page that would fix the thorns in the user experience of crossfit owners with MINDBODY from the get-go.  Similar to the partnership Reebok set up, the plan was to facilitate an interaction that was seamless, directly from the crossfit affiliates page to a “splash” page which would keep things simple. Quickly highlighting features & benefits in an engaging manner which ultimately ended with a call to action to learn more. (When deployed: the experience would be one page which loads all the pictures and content at once, then when the user hovers over and clicks on the orange tabs in discovery that they’re interactive, the screen would swipe like an iPhone gesture.  Attached is a rough powerpoint of the pitch.
  • Our Director of Sales addressed the team assigned to the crossfit vertical (3 sales reps & 3 associates, including myself) informing us that 1:3 clients were signing up with services from our leading competitor. Understanding the simplicity and ease of use that crossfit owners demand and explain when asked why they chose to go with our competition, I took it upon myself to prototype a way that we could restructure the initial interaction of crossfit owners with MINDBODY. With past feedback reasoning that we were too robust, I designed a splash page that would fix the thorns in the user experience of crossfit owners with MINDBODY from the get-go.  Similar to the partnership Reebok set up, the plan was to facilitate an interaction that was seamless, directly from the crossfit affiliates page to a “splash” page which would keep things simple. Quickly highlighting features & benefits in an engaging manner which ultimately ended with a call to action to learn more. (When deployed: the experience would be one page which loads all the pictures and content at once, then when the user hovers over and clicks on the orange tabs in discovery that they’re interactive, the screen would swipe like an iPhone gesture.  Attached is a rough powerpoint of the pitch.
  • Our Director of Sales addressed the team assigned to the crossfit vertical (3 sales reps & 3 associates, including myself) informing us that 1:3 clients were signing up with services from our leading competitor. Understanding the simplicity and ease of use that crossfit owners demand and explain when asked why they chose to go with our competition, I took it upon myself to prototype a way that we could restructure the initial interaction of crossfit owners with MINDBODY. With past feedback reasoning that we were too robust, I designed a splash page that would fix the thorns in the user experience of crossfit owners with MINDBODY from the get-go.  Similar to the partnership Reebok set up, the plan was to facilitate an interaction that was seamless, directly from the crossfit affiliates page to a “splash” page which would keep things simple. Quickly highlighting features & benefits in an engaging manner which ultimately ended with a call to action to learn more. (When deployed: the experience would be one page which loads all the pictures and content at once, then when the user hovers over and clicks on the orange tabs in discovery that they’re interactive, the screen would swipe like an iPhone gesture.  Attached is a rough powerpoint of the pitch.

Our Director of Sales addressed the team assigned to the crossfit vertical (3 sales reps & 3 associates, including myself) informing us that 1:3 clients were signing up with services from our leading competitor. Understanding the simplicity and ease of use that crossfit owners demand and explain when asked why they chose to go with our competition, I took it upon myself to prototype a way that we could restructure the initial interaction of crossfit owners with MINDBODY. With past feedback reasoning that we were too robust, I designed a splash page that would fix the thorns in the user experience of crossfit owners with MINDBODY from the get-go. 


Similar to the partnership Reebok set up, the plan was to facilitate an interaction that was seamless, directly from the crossfit affiliates page to a “splash” page which would keep things simple. Quickly highlighting features & benefits in an engaging manner which ultimately ended with a call to action to learn more. (When deployed: the experience would be one page which loads all the pictures and content at once, then when the user hovers over and clicks on the orange tabs in discovery that they’re interactive, the screen would swipe like an iPhone gesture. 

Attached is a rough powerpoint of the pitch.

  • My older personal website I designed during a course I took in the 2011 summer at California College of Art. (Wish I would have saved the $ I shelled out and invested in a service like Team Treehouse to educate myself instead. Teacher had absolutely NO passion for the course…. what a disappointment!)
  • My older personal website I designed during a course I took in the 2011 summer at California College of Art. (Wish I would have saved the $ I shelled out and invested in a service like Team Treehouse to educate myself instead. Teacher had absolutely NO passion for the course…. what a disappointment!)

My older personal website I designed during a course I took in the 2011 summer at California College of Art. (Wish I would have saved the $ I shelled out and invested in a service like Team Treehouse to educate myself instead. Teacher had absolutely NO passion for the course…. what a disappointment!)

  • Mobile App Design class winner. The contest was based on overall concept and feasibility into the market. 
  • Mobile App Design class winner. The contest was based on overall concept and feasibility into the market. 
  • Mobile App Design class winner. The contest was based on overall concept and feasibility into the market. 
  • Mobile App Design class winner. The contest was based on overall concept and feasibility into the market. 
  • Mobile App Design class winner. The contest was based on overall concept and feasibility into the market. 
  • Mobile App Design class winner. The contest was based on overall concept and feasibility into the market. 
  • Mobile App Design class winner. The contest was based on overall concept and feasibility into the market. 

Mobile App Design class winner. The contest was based on overall concept and feasibility into the market. 

  • “Startup Weekend SLO is an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile applications which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skillsets - primarily software developers, graphic designers and business people - to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.” Our team worked to develop a native iOS application alongside a web-app to fix the common problem of bad music being played in a public setting. With the mindset to help “Control the Queue”, over the weekend we strategized & prototyped a service to democratize the music selection amidst venues where groups of people find themselves hanging out. The above screenshots are a glimpse at the iOS app which only the “host” of the playlist would need to download. Pulling from the Spotify API and because the point of our service was to democratize things, we only wanted to give the host 2 controllable sets of functions; singing into their Spotify account, and basic controls for music output.  The web-app (site currently down as we work on further development) facilitates the interaction from the public. Once again our goal here was to keep it as minimal and straight forward as possible. With this in mind, we presented web-app users with a clean design showcasing the current song playing, the queue for what is coming up next on the playlist, and the simple choice of either voting the song up or down. Check out our splash page!
  • “Startup Weekend SLO is an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile applications which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skillsets - primarily software developers, graphic designers and business people - to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.” Our team worked to develop a native iOS application alongside a web-app to fix the common problem of bad music being played in a public setting. With the mindset to help “Control the Queue”, over the weekend we strategized & prototyped a service to democratize the music selection amidst venues where groups of people find themselves hanging out. The above screenshots are a glimpse at the iOS app which only the “host” of the playlist would need to download. Pulling from the Spotify API and because the point of our service was to democratize things, we only wanted to give the host 2 controllable sets of functions; singing into their Spotify account, and basic controls for music output.  The web-app (site currently down as we work on further development) facilitates the interaction from the public. Once again our goal here was to keep it as minimal and straight forward as possible. With this in mind, we presented web-app users with a clean design showcasing the current song playing, the queue for what is coming up next on the playlist, and the simple choice of either voting the song up or down. Check out our splash page!
  • “Startup Weekend SLO is an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile applications which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skillsets - primarily software developers, graphic designers and business people - to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.” Our team worked to develop a native iOS application alongside a web-app to fix the common problem of bad music being played in a public setting. With the mindset to help “Control the Queue”, over the weekend we strategized & prototyped a service to democratize the music selection amidst venues where groups of people find themselves hanging out. The above screenshots are a glimpse at the iOS app which only the “host” of the playlist would need to download. Pulling from the Spotify API and because the point of our service was to democratize things, we only wanted to give the host 2 controllable sets of functions; singing into their Spotify account, and basic controls for music output.  The web-app (site currently down as we work on further development) facilitates the interaction from the public. Once again our goal here was to keep it as minimal and straight forward as possible. With this in mind, we presented web-app users with a clean design showcasing the current song playing, the queue for what is coming up next on the playlist, and the simple choice of either voting the song up or down. Check out our splash page!

“Startup Weekend SLO is an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile applications which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skillsets - primarily software developers, graphic designers and business people - to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.”

Our team worked to develop a native iOS application alongside a web-app to fix the common problem of bad music being played in a public setting. With the mindset to help “Control the Queue”, over the weekend we strategized & prototyped a service to democratize the music selection amidst venues where groups of people find themselves hanging out. The above screenshots are a glimpse at the iOS app which only the “host” of the playlist would need to download. Pulling from the Spotify API and because the point of our service was to democratize things, we only wanted to give the host 2 controllable sets of functions; singing into their Spotify account, and basic controls for music output. 

The web-app (site currently down as we work on further development) facilitates the interaction from the public. Once again our goal here was to keep it as minimal and straight forward as possible. With this in mind, we presented web-app users with a clean design showcasing the current song playing, the queue for what is coming up next on the playlist, and the simple choice of either voting the song up or down.

Check out our splash page!

Industry experts weigh-in on what catches their eye when hiring

25 videos that sum up why interaction design is fascinating

phenomenal clips and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) gathered from web conferences and industry events. 

"User Experience (UX) is a hard skill to teach; no formal credentials are required, and no two career paths or job descriptions are the same. In fact, pinning down exactly what UX is can be difficult. It can mean different things to different people. Some UX design positions require only graphic design skills, others mainly planning and wireframing. Most, however, require a combination of design, planning, negotiation, conflict management, objectivity, leadership and openness. Above all, a good UX professional must have a natural appreciation of the human mind and be open to new attitudes and approaches and to exploring the impact of real people on the commercial environment around them."

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“One thing is for sure, though: UX skills are in high demand and short supply. It’s a candidate’s market, and companies need to try now more than ever to attract and retain the best minds in the field if they are to succeed online.”

“One thing is for sure, though: UX skills are in high demand and short supply. It’s a candidate’s market, and companies need to try now more than ever to attract and retain the best minds in the field if they are to succeed online.”